I 



CONCERNING 

-THE- 


HIGHER EDUCATION, 


An Address before the Western Association of 
Collegiate Alumnae, Oct. 30th, 1886, 


Chicago. 


IE3 IT 

Miss M. A. Jordan, 


(Vassar College) 


Teacher of Rhetoric and Anglo-Saxon at 


Smith College. 












h V 


> 













\ 




% 






















CONCERNING 


-THE—— 

HIGHER EDUCATION. 


An Address before the Western Association of 
Collegiate Alumnae, Oct. 30th, 1886, 
Chicago. 


IB IT 




Miss M. A. Jordan, 


(Vassar College) 


Teacher of Rhetoric and Anglo-Saxon at 


Smith College. 






LC 1ST I 

, tJ Cs 


gift of 

MRS. MAY WRIGHT SEWALI* 
BY MRS. IDA HOSTED HARPER 
LITER A RY EXECUTOR. 

1923 






(©ONGE^NING F^IGHEF^ GdUGAJFION. 


a T is an odd conceit in one of Beaumont and Fletcher’s 
plays by which an honest grocer, having taken his wife 
'■cap'v to the theater, is coaxed into lifting her to a place on 
the stage that she may give the players the benefit of her 
advice. The novelty of such responsibility in no wise awes 
her; her imagination works as vigorously on the stage as it 
had ever done in the back shop. The play shows us her un¬ 
questioning complacency as she sets aside the manager’s 
anxiety, turns tragedy into comedy, puts the plot by the ears 
and in spite of the pleading of the prompter and the bewilder¬ 
ment of the audience seems about to gain a bizarre but un¬ 
doubted success by the substitution of her own insistence for 
dramatic unity—when she stops, turns to her husband and ex¬ 
claims : ‘ ‘ George, I would have something done, and I cannot 
tell what it is.” The break-down is characteristic. For the 
last hundred years women have been hearing of the higher 
education; they have prayed and worked for it—now when 
the matter is largely in their own hands, some of the foremost 
own to a subtle misgiving—they find themselves in a position not 
unlike that of the grocer’s wife, they would have something 
done, and they cannot tell what it is. 

It is a habit now-a-days to speak of the higher education 
of women as a foregone conclusion^ Whether this be anything 
more than a fashion of speech ornot, it should serve as a 
danger-signal to the observant, for set phrases about great 
movements are as significant as barnacles on_a ship’s bottom; 
they mean the repair-dock, if nothing more. ) 

And unless I misread the signs of the times, our ideas of 
the higher education are in need of reconstruction. Among 
the host of women who have had courses in all the arts and 
sciences and are, nevertheless, not highly educated, in the 
multitude of short cuts to culture, we are losing sight of the 



generic marks of the object we would obtain. The higher 
education is fast becoming a truism, which is a species of de¬ 
teriorated truth. 

It requires moral courage to question a common-place, 
since the world is likely to value the orderly arrangement of 
its dried specimens of truth more highly than their possible re¬ 
vival by the letting in of a little air. 

A certain thoughtful and experienced man of my acquaint¬ 
ance turned to an enthusiastic representative of a woman’s 
college not long ago with the simple question: “ Is your work 
in any sense a charity ?’ ’ I watched their faces. On his was 
patience, that slowly gave way to disappointment; on hers a 
variety of emotions that said as plainly as words: “I have 
studied in college, I have taught in college, I have paid for my 
share of education and drawn a salary for educating other 
people, but I have never known whether it was a charity or 
not.” But she said: “Of course it is.” The difference be¬ 
tween work done with that spirit behind it and measuring tape 
is only a matter of taste. 

There is, I am sure, more doubt and uncertainty among 
the intelligent women of New York and Boston to-day as to 
the character and claims of the higher education than there 
has ever been opposition to it on the part of men. Its foes are, 
in a peculiar sense, of its own household. One of the results 
of this uncertainty is to be found in the constant experiment¬ 
ing that is going on in the secondary schools. There are 
French schools and English schools, schools with masters and 
with head mistresses, courses of study for the modern lan¬ 
guages and manners, and others for arithmetic and a mid-day 
luncheon. One makes a virtue of its large numbers and em¬ 
phasizes the discipline to be gained from the friction of a 
crowd; another limits its clientage to twenty families on Beacon 
Street, secretly regretting that the laws of debit and credit will 
not let it stop with five just opposite the Common. 

It is hardly possible to be ten minutes in the company of 
intelligent mothers of girls of this class without hearing 
anxious questions concerning the precise effect of a knowledge 
of surd quantities, speculations as to the influence that reciting 


5 


before twenty of her companions would have on the proper 
womanly modesty or the delicate originality of their daughters’ 
minds. Of a club of women (themselves either college grad¬ 
uates or recipients of the so-called higher education in some 
of its forms) met together in Boston not long ago for the pur¬ 
pose of discussing higher education, one maintained that the 
best substitute for her own fragmentary knowledge of many 
things and perpetual headache would be thorough gymnas¬ 
tic training and the study of languages by the natural method. 
Another, who had graduated at college, studied medicine and 
never practiced, insisted that the ends of higher education for 
women could be best met by teaching a girl bookkeeping and 
history, sending her to Europe to study modern languages 
one year out of every three until she was eighteen, and then 
letting her fall in love. One felt sure that the Boston Latin 
School and the Harvard Annex would meet all demands of 
the most exacting critic; one that the group system of Bryn 
Mawr was the only satisfactory treatment of the problem. 

All this, so far as the higher education is concerned, is 
nonsense or it may find a more qualified description in what 
John Locke would call “a little articulated air.” Women 
must be educated; it is now a little more than seventy-five 
years since Sydney Smith reduced that moot question to the 
rank of a respectable truism by his demonstration of these 
theorems: 

That “there is no just cause why a woman of forty should 
be more ignorant than a boy of twelve years of age.” 

That ‘ ‘ when learning ceases to be uncommon among 
women, learned women will cease to be affected.” 

/ That it is a fallacy to suppose that ‘ ‘ if you once suffer 
/women to eat of the tree of knowledge, the rest of the family 
will very soon be reduced to the same kind of aerial and un¬ 
satisfactory diet.” 

\ That “nothing can be more perfectly absurd than to sup¬ 
pose that the care and perpetual solicitude which a mother 
feels for her children depends upon her ignorance of Greek 
and mathematics; and that she would desert an infant for a 
quadratic equation.” 


6 



That “self-complacency can never want an excuse; and 
the best way to make it more tolerable and more useful is to 
give to it as high and as dignified an object as possible.” 

That ‘ ‘ among men of sense and liberal politeness, a 
woman who has successfully cultivated her mind without di¬ 
minishing the gentleness and propriety of her manners, is 
always sure to meet with a respect and attention bordering 
upon enthusiasm.” 

That ‘ ‘ the happiness of a woman will be materially in¬ 
creased in proportion, as education has given to her the habit 
and the means of drawing her resources from herself. ’ ’ 

That “uneducated men may escape intellectual degrada¬ 
tion; uneducated women cannot.” 

That ‘ ‘ instead of hanging the understanding of a woman 
upon walls, or hearing it vibrate upon strings; instead of see¬ 
ing it in the clouds, or hearing it in the wind, we should 
make it the first spring and ornament of society, by enriching 
it with attainments, upon which alone such power de¬ 
pends. ’ ’ 

And so far as this phase of the subject is concerned, here 
is all the law and the gospel. Absolutely nothing more has 
been said on this topic since Sydney Smith sent his paper to 
the Edinburgh Review, spite of the ink and breath daily spent 
in its treatment. But Sydney Smith, at least, was under no 
misapprehension of the real end of his effort—his plea was 
for the education of women; and, though there is not a sug¬ 
gestion, from end to end of his article, that he thought him¬ 
self dealing with anything more than its primary phases, yet 
we find half his positions being treated now as integral parts 
of the so-called higher education. This confusion is disas¬ 
trous; it involves us in the expense of doing work that has 
been already done; and where past results are known and 
accepted, makes the new movement as truistic as the old. 
This cannot be, if the higher education is anything more than 
a name; and for its being something more I find evidence 
in the very restlessness of public opinion about it. Mere 
names do not die hard. 

The higher education is not a process or a method; it is an 


7 


attitude. Its correlative is not the school-room, but life. To 
be a sharer in the higher education is to undergo as radical 
and complete a mental reorganization as that known in re¬ 
ligion under the name of conversion. Such subtle polariza¬ 
tion is at once recognized by its influence on candid souls 
everywhere, and in the end is independent of the ‘ ‘ ologies. ’ ’ 
A highly educated woman can afford to be ignorant of a great 
many things, but she must never stop growing. 

The first requisite for this new attitude is faith—faith in 
those higher, finer intuitions, whose birth is a perpetual 
miracle, and whose culture goes on in the rare atmosphere ly¬ 
ing between mental automatonism and genius. Short of this, 
the higher education could do no more than sham poetry— 
give us new quotations instead of new culture. 

This faith is another name for that direct contact with the 
underlying mystery in life and thought that seems to be a 
special endowment of some natures, but which is acquired 
by painful apprenticeship to the actual. The possession of 
this faith saves a woman from, what I consider, the character¬ 
istic blunder of our sex—mistaking drudgery for work. 

The popular fallacy is a grave one that puts so-called 
‘ ‘ good work ’ ’ in place of definite accomplishment. Only in 
a woman’s world is it enough to go through the motions with¬ 
out the results of work; for everybody else, the reverence of 
work for work’s sake went out with the middle age sanctity 
of dirt and pain. There is a world of suggestion in Schiller’s 
name of Spieltrieb (play impulse) for the fine, free activity of 
the soul when it has successfully met all the demands of sense 
and form. The everyday contempt for ‘ ‘ a dig ’ 9 is balanced 
by the crowd’s thrill of admiration at the sight of easy hero¬ 
ism or fretless work. 

The soul’s playtime must be earned, however. A parallel 
illustration of the truth that perfect flexibility can be gained 
only through nice adjustment is shown in Lord Lytton’s 
shrewd observation that gaiety is sure to be an offensive thing 
in any woman except one of the most perfect breeding. The 
rude chamber-maid in many a woman might escape recogni¬ 
tion if there were no such things as leisure or jokes in the 


8 



world. Can there be any sharper discrimination of character 
than that implied in taking one’s pleasure sadly ? 

The failures caused by lack of this faith come before us 
every day. So many women, unlike Tennyson’s moth, wither 
in a fruitless fire. They make an expensive luxury of mar¬ 
tyrdom. We all recognize the woman in Frederick W. Rob¬ 
ertson when he cries, “ I must pull till the harness galls, pain 
makes me creative.” 

Honest faith in one’s own relation to the work of the world 
can never counsel the petty destruction of the power for work. 
The possession of this intrepidity is one of the strongest ele¬ 
ments of power in the distinctively masculine mind, and often 
enables it to maintain claims whose success would otherwise be 
inexplicable. Philip Gilbert Hamerton accounts for the extra¬ 
ordinary hold that St. John had over Jane Eyre on the ground 
that a certain elevated feminine vanity in her was conciliated by 
his assurances that she would do admirable missionary work. 
No woman will admit the truth of this analysis. With more 
or less of vagueness, we all feel that his influence was personal, 
his was the compelling charm of a nature saturated with be¬ 
lief in the value of its own aims. The conditions under which 
his claim was asserted were false ones, and he failed to estab¬ 
lish it; but the claim was a real one, made possible for the 
time being by a woman’s recognition of the powers of a man’s 
strength, not by his detection of her weakness. But this 
quality itself is sexless, and it is at once the misfortune and 
reproach of women that they have not more of it. Reinforced 
by its tonic quality some women are always beyond the reach 
of circumstances. Misery cannot subdue them, nor pleasure 
enervate. They do not cry out to death to deliver them, for 
life is a perpetual emancipation. The ultimate resource and 
defense of character lies in the elusiveness of growth. The 
wisest of her sex can know no more than this. 

A second factor in this equation of the higher learning is 
what I must call the sense of proportion. It is difficult of 
definition, but it makes its possessor as autocratic as a tea- 
taster. In one form or another you are constantly meeting it 


in life. It is the sense of values that makes a good broker, a 
sagacious merchant or a great artist.) 

Culture itself is only another name for a nice discrimina¬ 
tion of values, its object not to repeat to-day’s prices, like a 
stock-exchange ticker, but to make one independent of their 
rise and fall. The education of woman constantly fails here 
by substituting one or more special tastes for a universal apti¬ 
tude. Mallock shadows this truth when he distinguishes the 
two aspects of literature and poetry. Let me quote: 

“ The general, catholic use of poetry is not to make us ad¬ 
mire the poetry of poems, but discern the poetry of life. I, 
myself, am devoted to literature as literature, to poetry as po¬ 
etry. I value it not only because it makes me appreciate the 
originals of the things it deals with, but for itself. I often 
like the description of a sunset better than I like a sunset. I 
don’t care two straws about liberty, but my mind is often set 
all aglow by a good ode to her. Few things give me such 
pleasure, for the moment, as an apt quotation from Horace 
or Shakspere; but this, I admit is a hobby—a private hobby 
—this distinct literary taste, just as a taste for blue china is, 
and must certainly not be confused with culture in its deeper 
and wider sense.” 

To mistake the nature of culture here, is to introduce hope¬ 
less confusion into the methods by which it is attained and 
the ends which it sets forth. The special tastes which have 
been trained and drilled, ought to act as so many channels for 
the entrance of an electric current, spreading the infection of 
its activity through the entire organism. The transformation 
by which all becomes the whole, is the work of the higher ed¬ 
ucation. When this work has been imperfectly done, eccen¬ 
tricity of some sort results. In New England much is said 
about culture, perhaps still more is thought about it, and yet 
it would be difficult to find a region where some of its princi¬ 
pal characteristics are less frequently displayed. The pain¬ 
fulness of culture becomes manifest with every sin against pro¬ 
portion. 

In this connection a tragic interest attaches to best clothes 
and Sunday bonnets when compassed by an effort quite out of 


10 


proportion to their real value. Would anybody seriously 
weigh the glories of a well-furnished parlor against the lei¬ 
sure dissipated in housework, or balance the desirability of 
seal skin sacques by the privacy invaded by boarders ? But 
we are told that many a woman does all this and learns 
Greek and Hebrew, too. Yes, and if she lives through 
the experience she dies a good manager, but not a cul¬ 
tivated woman. A soul may be choked as well as starved. 
A like mistake is made in the method of intellectual 
training. Studies are treated like boarders, taken in, housed 
and fed at so much a term; at its end, hostess and guest 
part with mutual good will. Thoughts are taken into the 
mind as if it were an oven to give hard or slack bake, the 
results to be used for immediate consumption. This may be 
intellectual housewifery—it is certainly not mental growth. 
The truth is that these things are incidentals, desirable enough 
in themselves, and only significant when they require the ef¬ 
fort necessary to gain the essentials of intellectual life. Once 
they have overstepped their proper limits in a woman's esteem, 
let her claims to culture be what they may, she takes her piace 
by poor Mrs. Tulliver, with her pitiful regret for the patterns 
she chose, the cloths she spun, and, above all, the things with 
her name on ’em. 

Again, this failure to get the values of things shows itself 
in hurry and greed. Every teacher is familiar with that con¬ 
stantly offered excuse for poor work: : “I want to get all I 
can, you know.” In the midst of constant feeding, the mind 
remains unfed. From its purely intellectual side, this is one 
of the most absurd delusions possible; it is exactly as if 
Barnum’s living skeleton should put on the clothes and as¬ 
sume the carriage of the fat man under the impression that 
he was weighing 300 pounds. 

As a safeguard against these mistakes, we hear a good deal, 
even in New England, of what is called the noble Bohemian- 
ism. The Bohemian, according to a recent authority, is the 
man who, with small means, desires and contrives to obtain 
the intellectual advantages of wealth, which he considers to be 
leisure to think and read, travel and intelligent conversation. 


11 


As thus described, the Bohemian is hardly less essential to a 
healthy society than the Mugwump, but he will not keep his 
place. Having foregone steam heat and silver spoons in the 
interests of intellectual pursuits, he proceeds to despise these 
minor blessings and contemptuously avoids the society of 
those who still use them. Such action is uncalled for, and is a 
sin against proportion. A man is as much a Philistine for 
ascribing evil qualities to silver spoons as for finding in their 
possession a saving grace. It is quite as abnormal to hate con¬ 
ventions as it is to be enamored of them. And it must be 
admitted that the Bohemian, whether man or woman, has no 
name to the title of noble who is not as much at ease in the 
presence of conventions as in their absence. Nobody can af¬ 
ford to despise what he cannot master. To be irritated at the 
lack in oneself of acquirements which have been intelligently 
postponed for higher ends is surely the mark of a petty soul. 
To be irritated at the possession by others of acquirements 
which one has neglected to gain is still pettier. All the graces 
and amenities of life claim allegiance from the Bohemian, in 
exact proportion to his nobility, so long as they do not inter¬ 
fere with his higher ends. Failure to meet these demands is not 
a mark of Bohemianism but of the laziness inherent in the 
natural man. Shakspere was guilty of more than a geographi¬ 
cal solecism when he gave Bohemia a sea-coast; it is hemmed 
in on every side by neighbors and its most loyal citizens are 
those who pay the heaviest frontier duties of sympathetic ob¬ 
servance. There is no port at which the true Bohemian can 
take ship and put an ocean between himself and these subtlest 
responsibilities. 

But whether in Bohemia or Hanover Square, this sense of 
values, when put into action, appears as grace, and grace is 
the outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual 
economy, to which straight lines and curves are nobly indiffer¬ 
ent as being, under changed conditions, the shortest distance 
between two points. 

And so the higher education ought to supply a woman with 
a judgment at once autocratic, instructive and sympathetic. 
Its decisions should be as final as those of Kant’s categorical 


imperative—holding good in a world of adjustment so delicate 
that a blunder is worse than a crime. 

A third essential of the higher education is responsibility; 
and here it might seem that women would have no lesson 
to learn. We have always been taught that they were embod¬ 
ied consciences, with a moral sense so vital that it is the last 
good thing to die in their characters, and the first to re¬ 
vive. Much of this is the most misleading truism; women 
are responsible much as dogs have thumbs, and I distinct¬ 
ly charge existing methods of education with having left 
this rudimentary sense much as they found it. A clever 
young woman, teaching in a fashionable school in New 
York, wrote not long ago, to a friend who, she thought, 
was insisting upon too high a grade of work—“Of course 
you understand that our school is preparatory to marry¬ 
ing a millionaire.” With all due regard for my friend’s 
powers of satirical observation, a very little search into the 
working of her school convinced me that she had stated ex¬ 
actly what it was not. Had she been able to make good her 
words, her school would have been unique. Had it prepared 
girls to marry millionaires, instead of to be supported and in¬ 
dulged by them, one might now be looking for a comparative¬ 
ly early settlement of the labor question. No existing accu¬ 
sation can be so damaging to the higher education of women 
as the simple statement that the main result of the labor 
troubles of the past four years, so far as educated women are 
concerned, has been the formation of clubs to study text books 
on political economy. The womanly responsibility of the 
country can still find scope enough in the discussion of the 
comparative merits of Mill and Carey, Wayland and Sumner. 
These are only horn-book and primer methods; one riot is 
enough to teach us that the laws of supply and demand do 
not govern a mob; that only one side of even the most en¬ 
lightened theory of rent appeals to a brick-layer’s wife. 
Economic theory, with its prescriptions of generalized laws to 
be taken alternately every two hours, religion, with its ex¬ 
hortations to charity, do not touch the root of the matter. It 
is all a question of social proportion and individual responsi- 


13 


Bility, in which women, as long as they remain the great in¬ 
centives to effort, must do the bulk of the work. The public 
opinion that stays at home in Courtlandt Street cellars, is the 
real backing of the strikers at the horse-car company’s offices; 
and this public opinion can not be reached by petitions to the 
Legislature, by sermons, or by the policeman’s “billy;” for 
in America even the law does not strike a woman. One de¬ 
partment of this practical problem women have had almost ex¬ 
clusive possession of for many years, and it might be supposed 
that their increased enlightenment and improving administra¬ 
tion would have produced a model order of things. But the 
whole question of domestic service was never so badly off as 
it is to-day. Granting all that is possible to the confusing 
influence of immigration and fluctuating social conditions, 
there still remains a wide margin of misrule attributable to 
nothing but a lacking sense of responsibility. If every sup¬ 
posedly educated woman in the last fifty years had had the 
eyes to see and the will to meet her duties as mistress, is it 
conceivable that there would now be so complete a blank 
where the corresponding feeling among servants ought to be ? 
It is a standing disgrace to the alleged influence of the high¬ 
er education that there is so little field for self-respecting 
workers in domestic service. It has come to such a pass that 
one must fracture a bone, or have a fever, to gain the intelli¬ 
gent service of such women as in our great-grandmothers’ 
times, under the name of ‘ ‘ help, ’ ’ washed dishes and went to 
prayer-meeting, helped train the children, and dying, were 
buried in the family lot, with the years of their faithful serv¬ 
ice honorably recorded above their heads. Is not all this a 
rather heavy premium to put on brittle bones and weak heads 
as opposed to health and growth ? 

There is another aspect of this failure which is, if possible, 
more serious. A keen student of women wrote not long ago — 
“On the whole I do not think that the frivolity of light-minded 
women has been so harmful to noble causes as the readiness 
with which serious women place their immense influence at 
the service of constituted authorities, however wrongfully 
those authorities may act.” The sense of conduct, about 


which Matthew Arnold has so much to say, seems to exist in 
women too often as a highly generalized abstraction. Do the 
social and economic relations of sewing women and mill girls 
owe nothing of their hardships to the neutrality of educated 
women? A hygienic conscience makes it impossible for a 
college graduate to run a sewing machine more than a given 
number of hours a day, but this sensitiveness rarely extends 
to such exercise of the faculty as would stand in the way of 
buying hand embroidery at starvation prices, or would pre¬ 
vent a style of expenditure quite irreconcilable with a proper 
recognition of broad human relations. Feminine culture in 
America has proved quite equal to the appreciation of Kens¬ 
ington needlework and Oriental art; it has even risen to some 
originality of effort here. Philanthropy has not fared so well; 
most of our methods are as out of date as the anti-macassars 
and Berlin wool landscapes of our English aunts. The prop¬ 
osition that every human being has a right to good food, 
good air, good water, and to get on in the world, will never be 
anything but an air-blown truism, until women vitalize it; and 
this, for the simple reason that their indifference stands for 
the fatal inertia that is the only real obstacle in the way of 
natural truth. Somebody has said that it takes a highsouled 
man to raise the masses to cleaner sties; true, and in a cer¬ 
tain sense, this is all that he can do, the rest waits for the 
transforming influence of women on women. 

This sense of responsibility manifests itself in a fine irra¬ 
tionality which George Eliot thinks is characteristic of emo¬ 
tion in general, when it refuses to adopt the quantitative views 
of human anguish that thirteen happy lives are a set off 
against twelve miserable ones, with a balance on the side of 
satisfaction. The higher education makes it a duty for 
women to do what Henry James mockingly calls “ weighing 
moon beams ”—it forces them to be still nobly interrogative 
and tentative, when the ideal Frenchman has pigeon-holed 
the rest of the world into neat types and classes. 

But all this, I am told, is either exactly what everybody 
has been saying for the last fifty years, or very transcendental 
and in no way concerned with the practical teaching of girls 


15 


and women. I venture to think differently, f On the consistent 
acceptance and intelligent application of these positions, 
as principles, seems to me to depend exactly this practical 
quality of which we are talking. Forty-six years ago Dr. 
West could not find a woman to teach algebra in Kutgers 
College; he believed that women could master the binomial 
theory and himself taught one to carry through the work of 
the first class in the higher mathematics. Afterward he edu¬ 
cated a generation of teachers in mathematics and the classics, 
and has abandoned his work to-day, to become the head of a 
school for secondary education. I have never heard him set 
forth his reasons for the change, but they seem to me to lie 
clearly enough in the relation of his character, with its re¬ 
markable benevolence and magnetism, to the conditions of the 
problem he was interested in. The so-called higher educa¬ 
tion was becoming more and more a highly systematized and 
methodized thing that could go of itself. Whatever misgivings 
he may have felt as to the propriety of such development, 
of one thing he must have been in no doubt—that the primary 
education could not go by itself. Certain characteristics in the 
minds of students he sends to college and into life testify to 
the reality of such a distinction. 

They have been “prepared,” as the saying is, by the in¬ 
fusion of something else than the catalogue requirements of 
Greek, latin and mathematics, and on the existence of this 
something else depends the possibility of the higher educa¬ 
tion in every given case. 

And just here there is an immense amount of mistaken loy¬ 
alty among women. It is assumed to be a generous thing to 
rank each other's abilities more highly than they deserve, a 
kindly thing to take aspiration for ascertained accomplishment. 
The highest claims of loyalty, generosity and kindness can be 
met only by truth. A virtuous woman is a very different thing 
from an intellectual one, and no conceivable end is served by 
calling them by the same name. And yet I see this tendency 
everywhere; the girls in the high school establish a kind of 
intellectual tariff to protect the recitations of their weak sis¬ 
ters from criticism; in college, discussion of individual abili- 



/ 

\ 


16 

ties is tabooed as bad taste and questionable Christianity. As 
alumnae we are truer to each other as women than as workers. 
I should deplore an exact equality of conditions between men 
and women in intellectual work on the ground that it would 
open the way to more bad craft than already exists. A poor 
pudding is susceptible of easier tests and more immediate re¬ 
jection than a false philosophy—a true philosophy will take 
care of itself. In the present state of things, it would be 
hardly more than magnanimous in us to rejoice if society 
should force women to be angels; we ought not to complain 
if it insists that our work shall be honest, by disallowing what 
is dishonest, and forcing the rest to prove itself. A few 
years ago one of the leading colleges for women was severely 
criticised for accepting a legacy burdened with the condition 
that when the chairs of instruction it endowed should be held 
by women, the money should be forfeited. The shrewd, old 
man who made the condition was, in his way, a good friend to 
women when he established a definite value for their services. 
When women are worth that endowment to the college, it 
will be forfeited. If they never are, the chances of blunder¬ 
ing work in the departments represented are so much the 
less. 

In this immediate connection it would appear that the 
claim, so strongly urged by women seventy-five years ago, to 
an education as good as that of men, is giving place to the 
assertion of the right to be as badly educated as they, with a 
prospect of equally good pay. The interests of the higher 
education of women do not seem to me to be at all involved 
with the question of the inducements or advantages held out 
to students in its conduct. The higher education is as final a 
necessity for some women as the satisfaction of hunger or 
thirst; for all others it is without significance or harmful. In 
one case, their presence in the higher schools is an injury to 
the community; in the other, to the individual. I can hardly 
imagine more disastrous influences for a woman’s moral nature 
than the living for a term of years in formal relations with 
a community whose intellectual and spiritual requirements 
she has neither the ability nor the desire to meet. It is an 


17 


injustice to make the higher education responsible for these 
inevitable shirks or rebels. 

And yet are we not in danger of confusing these distinc¬ 
tions by making the conditions of such discipline too easy ? 
The demand for wider opportunities on the part of women 
seems to be increasingly out of proportion to the number of 
those who really use the opportunities; and too often the in¬ 
terpretation of the demand itself calls for nothing more than the 
right to two or three letters over a miscellaneous collection of 
special courses, irregular work and expert book-keeping in col¬ 
lege equivalents. There can be little doubt that the course of 
the English universities in this regard has been for the best in¬ 
terests of the higher education of women, although undertaken, 
perhaps, in the spirit of conservatism. At Cambridge, for in¬ 
stance, women are not admitted to the ‘ ‘ pass ’ ’ examinations, 
but only to the higher ones for the Tripos—thus making it im¬ 
possible for any woman to make the blunder of supposing that 
she wishes the higher education, when what she is working for is 
a degree. These distinctions are better managed in England 
than with us. The University of London is such a body as it 
is sometimes proposed that all the colleges of America should 
make themselves—a body whose raison d’etre is expressed in 
the term, examining board, and whose work is to prescribe 
courses of study, examine the proficiency of candidates, and 
confer degrees. But no Englishman ever supposes that the 
University of London’s diploma stands for the same thing as 
one from Oxford. And no Englishman proposes that they 
shall be interchangeable. It was an Englishman who said 
not long ago: ‘ ‘ Have a university in shanties, no, in tents, 
but let there be great teachers in it!” Under, around and 
above all mere acquirements is this subtile infection of char¬ 
acter, making the essence of the higher education as different 
from erudition, as the good smell of the tender grape is from 
sheepskin. 

I cannot believe that it was nothing more than a narrow¬ 
minded wish to protect the business interests of German stu¬ 
dents that made the Gottingen authorities lately object to the 
precedent of bestowing their Doctor’s Degree upon an American 


18 


* * 

applicant at the close of his first semester. It serves as a 
reminder that the degree of the university is, in a measure at 
least, descriptive of its holder, not simply a business invest¬ 
ment. Miss Thomas, the dean of Bryn Mawr, makes it 
a rule to employ no teachers who do not hold a degree from 
some foreign university. Does anybody for a moment suppose 
that it is the parchment she is particular about ? She 
means simply that she wishes a certain kind of scholar¬ 
ship and definite culture, which are gained at these universi¬ 
ties; but what would become of her distinction if the ability to 
answer the questions of the German examiners by cable were 
all that could be certainly inferred from the possession of the 
degree ? It was a great advance on the existing culture of 
medicine when Paracelsus insisted that no diagnosis could be 
satisfactory when made from the knowledge of a given disease 
as it existed in one nation only. And so he tramped through 
Europe, gaining what he called knowledge. But the sixteenth 
century gave him no degree; it called him vagabond instead. 
If the universities of those days had extended their degree to 
work so unlike that which occupied their attention, the great 
service of a great heretic would have been hopelessly merged 
in routine. Are we not reversing the course of history when 
we try to bring within the scope of college degrees work, how¬ 
ever good in itself, that has been accomplished under other 
conditions ? Such work may be the best of its kind or of any 
kind, but it is simply introducing confusion into language to 
call it by the name of something else. At all events, the 
higher education is the last source from which such confusion 
ought to be looked for. Its very existence depends upon the 
maintenance of strict intellectual and spiritual distinctions as 
the opposite of the £ ‘ mush of concession ’ ’ in which it would 
flounder to its death. 

Ten years of experience and observation as a teacher of 
women have made me familiar with their two most frequently 
recurring faults—lack of originality and lack of thoroughness. 
These lacks seem to be not at all inherent in the character of 
women, but due almost entirely to their false attitude to what 
they call education. 








19 


The calculations made in a certain scientific department 
under the control of women are known among men working in 
that branch of science by their inaccuracy. Not one of these 
men doubts the ability of the women he criticises to deal with 
problems much more difficult. He simply comments on the 
failure of this greater ability to bring what he has considered 
an implied one in its train. 

It is a noticeable fact that effort and discussion have con¬ 
cerned themselves chiefly with the intellects of women. 

In the desire to prove the integrity and efficiency of a 
woman’s purely intellectual processes, these operations 
themselves have been over-emphasized and divorced from their 
natural accompaniments of will and feeling. The result of 
the separation is illustrated alike in the inability of some 
women to work their brains from any angle of application, 
except that familiar in the school-room, and in the unwilling¬ 
ness of others ever to return to that attitude. 

It is a capital error in the education of women to ignore 
the role played by their feelings. It is still worse to try to 
supersede these feelings by what is called good judgment 
based on logical processes. The logic of feeling is quite as 
important as the manipulation of syllogisms, and likely to be 
a good deal more practical. But there is an almost hopeless 
prejudice against a woman’s feelings; they are looked upon 
as the barrier between her and real success; they are popular¬ 
ly believed to be without rhyme or reason; it is thought dan¬ 
gerous to meddle with them, and peculiarly undesirable that a 
woman should investigate them herself. As long as the old 
saw that the knowledge of contraries is one has any force, it 
will be open to credence that what works a woman’s ruin may 
be her salvation. 

The thorough and original development possible to a 
woman in the line of higher education is dependent upon the 
amount of feeling which underlies her intellectual acquire¬ 
ments, and, subject to her intelligent control, can be brought 
to bear upon them. 

A pressing need of our educational system to-day is a 
thorough going psychology, to be applied in the kindergartens 



library of congress 




0 022 012 030 2 


20 


as well as taught to graduating classes. As to method, we 
need more of Darwin and less of Butler, more of ascertained 
fact and less of ascertained analogy. It is folly to persuade 
ourselves that routine will produce anything but hack work. 
And it makes no difference where this routine is applied, 
whether on the drill of the secondary schools or in the empty 
erudition of the higher learning. On the other hand, there are 
no such things as trifles. Ability to discuss the curve known 
as the Witch of Agnesi will not make a highly educated woman, 
but the failure to master it will keep her from being a mathe¬ 
matical scholar. The instincts, sensibilities and discrimina¬ 
tion which appear in the sum total of education as results, are 
no less essential in the processes underlying special ability. 
One of the New York judges declared that he could tell a first 
rate lawyer from a second rate one by the papers he sent out 
of his office, asserting that, other things being equal, the second 
rate man was sure to have no taste; that his inability to grasp 
the ideaof legal sesthetics stood for a certain clumsiness, which 
might make him miss a point of argument. If the schooling 
of the last two generations of American students had been 
conducted as much in the interests of conscience and will as 
of logic, it would not now be necessary for critics to complain 
that the bane of education is scholarship, the foe of literature, 
roots; or for foreigners to call attention to the fact that the 
public school system of the United States does not make hon¬ 
est citizens. It is difficult to respect the scholarship that 
misuses shall and will in an article of alleged industry and 
originality on the English subjunctive. It is hard to believe 
that a man who felt a workmanlike pride in balancing his 
books would be a defaulting bank president. More conscience 
of the enlightened sort introduced into the education of women 
will relieve it from the burden of many objections which are 
urged against it. The work done will be more independent 
and will acquire permanence. The higher education will be 
the fit discipline of a class of self elected women; its methods 
will be at once catholic and severe; its ends universal and indi¬ 
vidual. Already the higher education is an organism working 
itself free from confusion and restraint, a cause fit to engage 
the loyal service of good women. 



























































